Construction and application of the Rural Development Index to analysis of rural regions

The main purpose of this research was to construct a multidimensional (composite) index measuring the overall level of rural development and quality of life in individual rural region of a given EU country. In the rural development index (RDI) the rural development domains are represented by hundreds of partial socio-economic, environmental, infrastructural and administrative indicators / variable at NUTS-4 level (e.g. 991 variables / indicators describing various aspects of rural development in Poland; 340 variables / indicators in Slovakia). the weights of economic social and environmental domains entering the RDI index are derived empirically from the econometrically estimated intra- and inter-regional migration functions after selecting the ''best' model from various alternative model specifications (e.g. panel estimate logistic regression nested error structure model, etc). The RDI is empirically applied to the analysis of the main determinants of the rural/regional development in the individual rural areas in years 2002-2005 in Poland and in Slovakia at NUTS-4 level. Due to its comprehensiveness the RDI index is suitable both to analysis of the overall level of development of rural areas and to an evaluation of the impacts (impact indicator) of RD structural programmes at regional levels (NUTS-2-5).